INTRODUCTION
"What's the urgency?"
- U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (2)
"When they talk about the USA, they say it is a country with justice. That's a lie." (3)
President Joe Biden stood at the podium during his address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on September 21, 2021. He raised his hands in a classic power pose and said:
Instead of continuing to fight the wars of the past.. we are fixing our eyes on devoting our resources to the challenges that hold the keys to our collective future: Ending this pandemic, addressing the climate crisis, managing the shifts in global power dynamics, shaping the rules of the world on vital issues like trade, cyber and emerging technologies, and facing the threat of terrorism as it stands today. (4)
In this sweeping statement, the President gave a nod to the "global power dynamics" shaping broader geosociopolitical changes in the world. He acknowledged the scope of the world's problems and argued for the prioritization of "rebuilding our alliances, revitalizing our partnerships and recognizing they're essential and central to America's enduring security and prosperity." (5) President Biden's UNGA speech revealed a clear understanding of what is known in strategic management and business organization studies as the idea of complexity through mentioning global power dynamics in relation to changes in trade, technology, climate change, the pandemic, and terrorism. He added: "Our security, our prosperity and our very freedoms are interconnected, in my view, as never before. And so, I believe we must work together as never before." (6) His speech was a welcome reprieve from four years of the anti-globalist fatalism of President Donald Trump's America First jingoism.
Still, President Biden's 2021 UNGA speech rang hollow as a xenophobic scene unfolded at the Southern Border as immigration officials, reporters, and police met Haitian migrants seeking refuge with violence and anti-Black racism. (7) "When we go to the U.S., they closed all the access points. And we could not go to buy food," one Haitian migrant told CNN reporter Melissa Bell. (8) In another instance Eddy Teverme, who was also deported to Haiti from the United States, said, "[w]hen we arrived in the U.S., the authorities put us on a bus and sent us to jail, and said we would be released in two days. They put chains on our feet, around our stomachs, and our hands. They put us in cars and took us to the airport." (9) The accounts of these Haitian migrants are indicative of the experiences of thousands of other migrants who showed up at the U.S. border seeking...